Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 11 pp 3851—3863
Time-restricted feeding delays the emergence of the age-associated, neoplastic-prone tissue landscape
- 1 Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
- 2 Neuroscience Institute, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Cagliari, Italy
- 3 Department of Life and Environment Sciences University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
Received: May 6, 2019 Accepted: June 5, 2019 Published: June 12, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102021How to Cite
Copyright: Serra et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Aging increases the risk of cancer partly through alterations in the tissue microenvironment. Time-restricted feeding (TRF) is being proposed as an effective strategy to delay biological aging. In the present studies, we assessed the effect of long-term exposure to TRF on the emergence of the age-associated, neoplastic-prone tissue landscape. Animals were exposed to either ad libitum feeding (ALF) or TRF for 18 months and then transplanted with hepatocytes isolated from pre-neoplastic nodules. Both groups were continued ALF and the growth of transplanted cells was evaluated 3 months later. A significant decrease in frequency of larger size clusters of pre-neoplastic hepatocytes was seen in TRF-exposed group compared to controls. Furthermore, TRF modified several parameters related to both liver and systemic aging towards the persistence of a younger phenotype, including a decrease in liver cell senescence, diminished fat accumulation and up-regulation of SIRT1 in the liver, down-regulation of plasma IGF-1, decreased levels of plasma lipoproteins and up-regulation of hippocampal brain-derived growth factor (BDNF).These results indicate that TRF was able to delay the onset of the neoplastic-prone tissue landscape typical of aging. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation to describe a direct beneficial effect of TRF on early phases of carcinogenesis.